Even before you leave the house in the morning, government regulations help set the price of the coffee you drink, the voltage of electricity your alarm clock uses, and the types of programming allowed on the morning news.

Apparently unfulfilled with the current level of intrusion, government regulators have now set their sights on your diet. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported:

The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.

The fact that Americans tend to eat more salt than is healthy is not in dispute. According to the LA Times, Americans consume more than double what they need for good health. What is in dispute is whether it should be up to the individual or the government to make basic life decisions such as what to eat. While well intentioned, setting federal sodium limits marks yet another grim advance for the nanny state and further loss of freedom and personal responsibility.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much ordinary Americans can do about it. As with the majority of federal regulations promulgated each year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not need Congressional approval for such an action. Currently, under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the FDA has the power to determine what is considered a “safe level” of any substance found in manufactured foods and sets federal rules accordingly. As no level of sodium has yet been determined to be “safe,” all the FDA must do is decide a level they consider “safe” for use and manufactures must abide.

The nanny state wins yet again.

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The problem with all this "control" our government seems to want in our personal lives is that if they are trying to create a "perfect world" it's litterally impossible because we as humans are "not perfect." The idea of impossing regualtions to force us to conform is also impossible due to our nature and freedoms which most of us have always lived with. Therefore this "Nany state" experiment is due to failure right from the start on the grounds that for each law (or program) passed the support against will increase with every freedom that is taken away as a result. Show me what Western Erupopean country is actually happy with the government ordered society once people are subjected to the strict rules in which they live by. American's love their country because of it's freedoms to do as we wish and most of the time do not like to be told what to do like a child.

"Americans consume more than double what they need for good health." This statement does not equal, "Americans eat an unhealthy amount of salt". For the vast majority of people, eating too much salt has no health effects. It is bad for those that suffer from hypertension, but it doesn't cause hypertension.

The problem here is that with federal agencies being so deep in other people's pockets we don't know if their proposals are actually good for us or good for some entity. Why don't they just publish studies and let us decide?

Welcome to the new world conceived by environmentalists. A world where an ideal climate can be maintained by micromanaging the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. A world where ice must be maintained in our polar regions to prevent the flooding of the sea coasts of the world. A condition that also predisposes a return of the the next ice age. We are in an interglacial period you know, #5 we have named the Holocene for the last 10,000 years. We have a sun that has never overly warmed the earth contrary to Green alarmism. In fact their chief bogey man, greenhouse gases, is the only thing keeping our planet from icing up (tillites, a distinctive product of glacial action) are known in tropical locations dating from pre Cambrian times, 700 million and 2 billion years ago.

I cite all these contrary and discomfitting facts about the misdirection we have been led by concerned but poorly informed people. The geologic record is the only thing we have to to go on. Einstein did not believe that modeling could ever predict future weather because of the nonlinear components involved. I think recent events have more than borne out his fears with "climategate." Involvement of our Gov't politicized the situation to the point that science is being ignored and Green fantasy reigns. That is why I feel that the last thing our complex society needs is a bunch of lawyers making all the rules for us to live by, that we should all fit into a standardized mold. That is for insects.

There is a lower limit for each of us that we need salt wise. This is the RDA limit. The RDA is NOT the maximum that we need.

There is a group of people out there that don't get enough salt. They don't add salt to their diet. They don't eat much in the way of packaged foods and drink tons of water, because they have been told that they need at least 8 cups a day.

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